10 Web Fonts You Might Not Know About But Should

With the typographical landscape for web rapidly expanding, it’s becoming easier for designers to integrate a vast arsenal of custom type choices for web/mobile design. However, there’s a common thread amongst designers obsessed with finding new fonts to utilize in their design - where do you find faces that haven’t been overtly used and abused? There is more pressure than ever to create a unique voice online and choosing the right web fonts are an integral part of the online experience.

Here are some excellent fonts you should keep in mind for your next web design project:

#2 Frontage

This font is a versatile layered type system with no shortage of possibilities using a wide variety of fonts and colors. Create unique effects by adding the shadow font or use the capitals and bold cut for cool execution.

#4 Lust

#5 Nexa & Nexa Slab

The family is characterized by excellent legibility, a well-finished geometric design, optimized kerning, etc. Nexa is most suitable for headlines of all sizes, but it does well in a variety of text lengths as well.

#6 Geogrotesque

#7 Livory

Need something that looks like it sits perfectly under an old weeping willow tree? Livory has an organic look with a warm, poetic touch. With its melted corners and individual serifs, Livory has a smooth and handcrafted appearance in bigger sizes.

#10 Salome

Salomé offers a lot of ligatures & alternate forms, including R and K swashes, an ampersand alternative and titling ligatures. It can be used with Font-Face.

Cloud.typography

To give web designers a reliable tool for typography on the web, H&FJ recently launched a revolutionary web font library called Cloud.typography, which includes adaptations of some of their their most popular families, like Archer, Chronicle, Gotham, and Ideal Sans. They’re calling them ‘ScreenSmart’ fonts, and they have been completely rebuilt to display small text on the screen. Redesigned literally ‘in’ the browser, ScreenSmart fonts are fully-featured type families that offer outstanding quality on all the major platforms. A few

A few notable features

Render Quality - Multipurpose web fonts work great at larger sizes, but don’t usually perform well for setting text at small sizes. Pixel grids disfigure letterforms, especially at the text sizes where we all do most of our reading. ScreenSmart fonts are specifically built in and for the screen, so the render quality is outstanding, even at nine pixels. The creation of each ScreenSmart font involved reshaping the glyphs to work with pixel grids at every size. Additionally, proportions were altered to favor legibility, weights were adjusted so each style is differenciated from other members of the family, and characters were appropriately spaced to improve clarity.

Browser Optimization - Cloud.typography delivers different font files to each browser which means the fonts use different engineering strategies to play to the strengths of the environment. Each character in a ScreenSmart font is equipped with a set of detailed instructions called “hints,” which tell its outlines how to adapt to pixel grids at different point sizes.